This is Reddit, so taking any claims with a severely hefty earth sized grain of salt..
> Odd part 1: ... moving large numbers of VMs (100,000-500,000) over to Linux based virtualization in very short time frames.
> Odd part 4: Every one of these requests involves moving the VMs off VMWare or Hyper-V onto OpenShift, specifically.
As a Solution Architect at Red Hat, no sane sales rep would ever recommend or propose moving VMware footprints of that size onto OpenShift via OpenShift Virtualization[0]. As amazing as that payout would be, that would literally be account suicide if it ever got signed off on. The whole purpose behind OpenShift Virtualization is to aid in organization modernization as a way to consolidate workloads onto a single platform while giving app dev time to migrate their work to containers and microservice based deployments.
We are working on making OpenShift Virtualization as capable as we can (considering we're killing the Red Hat Virtualization product [upstream project: oVirt]) but it's not really meant, especially right now, to be a VMware replacement. That's what solutions like Nutanix are for.
This entire thing, if at all true which is unlikely, would smell of typical negotiation games to attempt to gain better pricing/discounts when it comes time for their VMware renewals. We see this a lot in attempts for customers to try and get better pricing when it comes Red Hat products, and potential customers the other way around with their existing vendors. Business is business and everyone will try to get the best deal they can, but the games do get annoying after a while.
> We are working on making OpenShift Virtualization as capable as we can (considering we're killing the Red Hat Virtualization product [upstream project: oVirt]) but it's not really meant, especially right now, to be a VMware replacemen
Didn't know RHEV was being killed. It makes sense, the enterprise virtualisation market is shrinking by the day, but it's still a bummer there's less competition. Is oVirt being maintained?
> That's what solutions like Nutanix are for.
Nope. Nutanix is for when you want to replace your hardware and software, have specific workloads that fit a hyperconverged hardware deployment, want a good piece of software with a ton of extras that don't really work all that well, being bash and random FOSS smushed together with duct tape. Oh, and you have money to burn.
Perhaps the poster is using the term 'virtualization' imprecisely, if s/he is deep in the VMWare world. Another interpretation would be that companies are looking to move to containerization on OpenShift, which would make a lot more sense.
My suspicion: these CEOs are trying to scope out the cost of adopting OpenShift, so that, when they're negotiating prices with VMWare, they can show how much money they would save with OpenShift in the long term. This may be essentially just an attempt to gain some negotiating leverage in the face of potential VMWare price hikes.
Not to mention that you need to have the ability to switch anyway in case there is some other problem with VMWare. Anytime you have a single supplier that you depend on you should have some mitigation plan ready to go should that supplier fail you. The mitigation plan may be a lot more expensive than the supplier you are using, the goal isn't to use them it is just to ensure you have an option.
Interesting, it does seem plausible that the cause is the VMWare price hike; as they specifically stated aiming at large enterprises because they’re slow to move, I wonder whether they may be overplaying their hand.
On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine these enterprises moving have a million of VMs before the end of the year, so they probably do have a point. But it just seems like short-sighted short-term thinking here, giving up enterprise market share in exchange for some additional $ now.
Any reduction in memory managed by VMWare would be savings though. Say they need 50% of the VMWare license this year and 5% next year they're probably still happy.
At least happy until whatever IBM has been promising behind closed doors runs out, and then IBM start turning the screws.
I am struggeling so hard... IT departments of two customer companies just moved VMs with a one week deadline to Azure and everything stopped working and I have the responsibility as external developer...
Weird SSL errors I have no clue how to fix. I think they are talking about my clients in this reddit post.
Wild stab in the dark: the only things that would kill SSL/TLS on a disk-image based lift & shift where the certificates and associated config moves with the VM are:
- An internal Certificate Revocation List (CRL) Distribution Point (CDP) was forgotten about and not moved along with everything else. These are often Enterprise PKI certificate authorities on servers like AD domain controllers. Admins will typically deploy new domain controllers in the cloud, and move everything else. They'll forget the old CAs and maybe even turn them off. This then causes SSL issues after... about a week.
- Another possibility is that they incorrectly moved an outbound access restriction. Again, overzealous network security admins tend to block Internet access on servers and forget about CRLs. It's an especially common issue on "secure" environments where someone decides to block HTTP outbound and only permit HTTPS because it's "secure". However, CRLs (and OCSP) absolutely require HTTP and will never work via HTTPS by design.
This seems unfair, it isn't necessary to attack the author just because the tone is a little conspiratorial. I'm sure there is a little embellishment in the post, but there doesn't seem to be any reason to doubt the author has noticed a real effect that may have a reasonable explanation. The VMware price hike idea seems like a very reasonable explanation
I lived through EMC's VMware tightening their grip, killing off our vendor "reflex firewall" by restricting their use of network APIs (to boost their Nicira acquisition which became NSX), then making us pay the vRAM vtax as part of the VSPP program (public cloud), and launching project Zephyr (vCloud Air) where they directly competed with us.
RIP VMware. Been getting Novell vibes from them for the last 10 years.
Fortunately it's quickly nipped in the thread on reddit. The news isn't new, and companies already had shy of a quarter to work on it, but not that we hit Q3 and forecasting for Licensing is now kicking in for Q1-Q2 23' it's now sudden that the capex will be $$$ so there is a huge rush to migrate to mitigate licensing cost and sunk cost of a yearly licensing option.
Most IT/Sysadmins do not communicate with Finance/FPA, but the ones that do are really ahead of the game. I'm fortunate that in my past and present org(s) I always include them on talks, and once they are on your side they are an invaluable ally. Money talks, finance talks.
IT and Finance are back office administration, or the other side of the house in many orgs and should be talking about all terms of licensing and proper forcasting, but I do see it strained because IT focuses on what the tech can do, and finance only understands money and liability.
But IT can also mitigate liability if it's framed properly. This MSP sysadmin is clearly only in tech and never went out of it. Which isn't bad. But it is a very, very common silo and trope for external IT partners.
What’s strange here is OpenShift as a target. The last I looked, VMs were just getting initial support - certainly not enough functionality or proving to encourage one to rehost 100k VMs onto it as a platform. Also why the assumption that IBM would treat them better than Broadcom/CA?
A commenter on the thread mentioned the VMWare price hikes, so it could be as simple as IBM sensing an opportunity to poach customers from VMWare (probably more overlap in potential customers than AWS/GCP/Azure) and aggressively selling OpenShift to the C-suite with a promise of "if we can get a deal done this year, we'll give you heavily discounted pricing for X years".
It does seem a bit strange that all of these requests supposedly come specifically "from the CEO" though, as I would expect most companies would have CTOs making purchase decisions like this.
For what it’s worth, I’ve heard that when the current war in Ukraine started the Moscow/Russian employees of a big US networking hardware company of which everyone on this forum has heard about had their access cut off instantly, as in the invasion started at around 2AM and when the employees tried to get to work that morning they found out they could no longer access the company’s resources.
Which tells me that that company’s HQ had already put a sort of kill switch in place for cases like this.
2 AM Moscow time is 3 PM Pacific time - if they had someone working west coast times it could be done in regular working hours. Dropping users from their VPN LDAP group (or directly from the VPN servers) doesn't take long.
I know of another SW company that did the same thing. Everybody at the company was then told not to contact or communicate with any of the employees in Russia. Then one of the executives told everybody that it was a vendor who was providing the remote access solution who pulled out of the country in a blame shift we saw right through.
How is this disturbing? People moving away from Windows must make everyone happy in my book. Probably just leverage in contract negotiations with VMWare as other comments have pointed out though.
It's a different market segment for sure, but at my company we spent considerable engineering resources migrating the codebase away from a proprietary embedded toolchain to gcc. The toolchain vendor's licensing scheme was expensive and annoying, and had no chance of sustainably scaling with the company's growth. They weren't willing to negotiate, and so they priced themselves out of relevance permanently. Maybe they thought we were bluffing?
It’s the sysadmins sub - ie the crowd dealing with the fallout when migrations go bad. So sudden big moves of questionable technical merit are disturbing to them
This is a possibility when pushing companies from perpetual licenses onto subscription and then upping their subscriptions. Wall street is heavily pressing SW companies to increase their ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) or some call it, you will own nothing and be happy. Switching to free software is looking more appealing at the enterprise level.
I tried to follow the advice. It's clearly someone who is working with computers and for a long time. The comments are touching various topics (from tech to society to random stuff) and it's likely that the person is behind a keyboard, not on a mobile phone: comments are rather long on average. That's quite compatible with sysadmin psychological profile.
Hard to say for sure, but at least I am confident that the OP is not a dog!
I quit my role at VMware a couple years ago to return to consulting. Nearly client I have worked with since then has dramatic reduction of vSphere footprint, if not outright elimination, on their roadmap.
VMware was burning bridges long before the Broadcom announcement. Broadcom is fuel on the fire.
They know something you don’t. That’s how most people make money. In all seriousness this appears to be cost cutting. They sat down with their CTOs and asked give me a list of cost cutting measures right down to the bone. The CTO says boss we pay for windows licenses, we could move to Linux and save a zillions of $$. CEO says “what are you waiting for do I have to tell you to get a new toilet roll if you run out of one ?”
worth pointing out, that while the timing of these two articles might make you think that, cost increases in light of the broadcom acquisition seems far more likely.
This definitely feels fake. Either just a fabulist or someone mad at VMware and wants to scare them. CEOs of Fortune 500 companies do not know about the Linux virtualization market.
mroche|3 years ago
> Odd part 1: ... moving large numbers of VMs (100,000-500,000) over to Linux based virtualization in very short time frames.
> Odd part 4: Every one of these requests involves moving the VMs off VMWare or Hyper-V onto OpenShift, specifically.
As a Solution Architect at Red Hat, no sane sales rep would ever recommend or propose moving VMware footprints of that size onto OpenShift via OpenShift Virtualization[0]. As amazing as that payout would be, that would literally be account suicide if it ever got signed off on. The whole purpose behind OpenShift Virtualization is to aid in organization modernization as a way to consolidate workloads onto a single platform while giving app dev time to migrate their work to containers and microservice based deployments.
We are working on making OpenShift Virtualization as capable as we can (considering we're killing the Red Hat Virtualization product [upstream project: oVirt]) but it's not really meant, especially right now, to be a VMware replacement. That's what solutions like Nutanix are for.
This entire thing, if at all true which is unlikely, would smell of typical negotiation games to attempt to gain better pricing/discounts when it comes time for their VMware renewals. We see this a lot in attempts for customers to try and get better pricing when it comes Red Hat products, and potential customers the other way around with their existing vendors. Business is business and everyone will try to get the best deal they can, but the games do get annoying after a while.
[0] https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/opens...
sofixa|3 years ago
Didn't know RHEV was being killed. It makes sense, the enterprise virtualisation market is shrinking by the day, but it's still a bummer there's less competition. Is oVirt being maintained?
> That's what solutions like Nutanix are for.
Nope. Nutanix is for when you want to replace your hardware and software, have specific workloads that fit a hyperconverged hardware deployment, want a good piece of software with a ton of extras that don't really work all that well, being bash and random FOSS smushed together with duct tape. Oh, and you have money to burn.
sfjailbird|3 years ago
simonebrunozzi|3 years ago
A dozen or more companies (poster claims it's exactly 14) can move 100k-500k VMs in a short time frame, without killing anything.
Otherwise, your concern would have been spot on.
pabs3|3 years ago
jollybean|3 years ago
Like possibly a national security issue of some kind.
'We' are at 'war' with Russia, after all.
jasonhansel|3 years ago
bluGill|3 years ago
rwmj|3 years ago
It installs virtio drivers into Linux & Windows guests and updates configuration and registry, so the VM will boot straight away on the target.
stingraycharles|3 years ago
On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine these enterprises moving have a million of VMs before the end of the year, so they probably do have a point. But it just seems like short-sighted short-term thinking here, giving up enterprise market share in exchange for some additional $ now.
mhio|3 years ago
At least happy until whatever IBM has been promising behind closed doors runs out, and then IBM start turning the screws.
sceptically|3 years ago
Weird SSL errors I have no clue how to fix. I think they are talking about my clients in this reddit post.
jiggawatts|3 years ago
Wild stab in the dark: the only things that would kill SSL/TLS on a disk-image based lift & shift where the certificates and associated config moves with the VM are:
- An internal Certificate Revocation List (CRL) Distribution Point (CDP) was forgotten about and not moved along with everything else. These are often Enterprise PKI certificate authorities on servers like AD domain controllers. Admins will typically deploy new domain controllers in the cloud, and move everything else. They'll forget the old CAs and maybe even turn them off. This then causes SSL issues after... about a week.
- Another possibility is that they incorrectly moved an outbound access restriction. Again, overzealous network security admins tend to block Internet access on servers and forget about CRLs. It's an especially common issue on "secure" environments where someone decides to block HTTP outbound and only permit HTTPS because it's "secure". However, CRLs (and OCSP) absolutely require HTTP and will never work via HTTPS by design.
the_gipsy|3 years ago
[deleted]
andrenotgiant|3 years ago
dmw_ng|3 years ago
AyyWS|3 years ago
RIP VMware. Been getting Novell vibes from them for the last 10 years.
rejectfinite|3 years ago
rootsudo|3 years ago
Fortunately it's quickly nipped in the thread on reddit. The news isn't new, and companies already had shy of a quarter to work on it, but not that we hit Q3 and forecasting for Licensing is now kicking in for Q1-Q2 23' it's now sudden that the capex will be $$$ so there is a huge rush to migrate to mitigate licensing cost and sunk cost of a yearly licensing option.
Most IT/Sysadmins do not communicate with Finance/FPA, but the ones that do are really ahead of the game. I'm fortunate that in my past and present org(s) I always include them on talks, and once they are on your side they are an invaluable ally. Money talks, finance talks.
IT and Finance are back office administration, or the other side of the house in many orgs and should be talking about all terms of licensing and proper forcasting, but I do see it strained because IT focuses on what the tech can do, and finance only understands money and liability.
But IT can also mitigate liability if it's framed properly. This MSP sysadmin is clearly only in tech and never went out of it. Which isn't bad. But it is a very, very common silo and trope for external IT partners.
tablespoon|3 years ago
No. Everything on reddit is true.
pinewurst|3 years ago
nyc640|3 years ago
It does seem a bit strange that all of these requests supposedly come specifically "from the CEO" though, as I would expect most companies would have CTOs making purchase decisions like this.
markild|3 years ago
"Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM".
paganel|3 years ago
Which tells me that that company’s HQ had already put a sort of kill switch in place for cases like this.
ciceryadam|3 years ago
kornhole|3 years ago
jollybean|3 years ago
And these big brand companies with international offices are full of spies it's good cover.
pixelbeat__|3 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32834988
sithadmin|3 years ago
faeriechangling|3 years ago
jupp0r|3 years ago
sgtnoodle|3 years ago
Havoc|3 years ago
ForHackernews|3 years ago
> VMWare had a price hike in August and is going to a very aggressive subscription model so that may play a role here.
Sounds like CEOs trying to gain leverage in negotiating with VMWare.
netrap|3 years ago
kornhole|3 years ago
phillipwei|3 years ago
krasin|3 years ago
Hard to say for sure, but at least I am confident that the OP is not a dog!
ik8s|3 years ago
sithadmin|3 years ago
VMware was burning bridges long before the Broadcom announcement. Broadcom is fuel on the fire.
vardump|3 years ago
As much as I don't like VMWare as a company, I have to agree, this stinks.
qwertyuiop_|3 years ago
egberts1|3 years ago
urbandw311er|3 years ago
trhoad|3 years ago
Leadership taking a strategic decision to shop around for options following the VMWare price increase isn't so crazy. In fact, I'd say it's expected.
ukasyah900|3 years ago
[deleted]
reportgunner|3 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32834988
mijoharas|3 years ago
spoonjim|3 years ago
recursv_thnkng|3 years ago
There’s not enough hours in the day where these CEOs would be so far down in the weeds of the business that they’re making VM flavor decisions.